What's going on at PSA in their T206 pop report?
 

So in one year, at the peak of the market that is so backlogged that maybe 6 million cards are still sitting at PSA ready to be graded, the population of PSA graded T206 cards has DECLINED in the past year. This is coming from Gemrate, a company that monitors how many cards PSA is grading monthly.

Declined not just in a small sense, but by 33,000 slabs. That is 15% of all PSA graded T206 cards. That is also the equivalent of 63 complete sets of 524 cards. Even the biggest T206 Master Set collector, David Hall, only had like 5000 cards in this set, right?

So what's going on?
1) Did everyone who has ever cracked a PSA T206 out of slab for their binder sheets send their flips in at one time for removal?
2) Did PSA use their APR tool, VCP, Worthpoint, PWCC history, etc to figure out all the missing brands/series/factories in order to properly categorize them after having changed their set parameters over the years from just "T206", to "T206 Sweet Caporal" then "T206 Sweet Caporal 350", and now "T206 Sweet Caporal 350 Factory 25"? And they're currently masked as they replace the data in the database?
3) Is it some system glitch that only seems to be affecting T206s?
4) Something to do with the grading scandal?

It's curious. If you guys have PSA slabbed T206 cards, check and see if any of them have been removed from the registry. If so, did PSA notify you? Does the flip match the Cert Number Validation tool?

I was looking at the WaJo pops yesterday for both poses and they definitely looked different mainly for the Piedmont and Sweet Cap versions.

Chad

T206 pops
 

Two weeks ago, I recorded ~261k overall at the PSA site, and now I'm seeing the ~220k number, too. (I can't even find T206s on GemRate.)

Either the PSA site is acting funny or they fixed something very recently.

Pretty sure the PSA pop has dropped on the Magie Error as well, its under 100 now

Another option then: maybe double-counting of some slabs due to the various flip label variations? Maybe the numbers were bloating over time and this was an adjustment to actuals once they detected the software summing error?

Has anyone who is so interested thought of reaching out to PSA and simply asking them what happened, and then report back? Would save a lot of otherwise needless conjecture and speculation.

Nonsense Bob! What fun would that be? You know we all come here to whine, complain, argue and occasionally we discuss something too.

Well usually you would be correct that going to the source is a great idea actually unless that source is a TPG company. PSA is not very transparent and keeps things very close to the vest. Whatever they are up to, assuming this is a permanent correction and not a temporary technical issue, if they had wanted anyone to know they would have let us know in advance. Otherwise they give the silent treatment. Of course this is a prefect chance for snowman to come apologize for them.

LOL

I hear you Chase, and not trying to stop anyone's fun. And understand about people's opinions of PSA possibly not being as open and responsive as they'd like. But figured this is a more innocuous topic with no one looking to blast PSA, just find out what may be going on. :D

I think the early slabs that had no brand attribution were counted twice.

Total Change
261.0k – 220.8k = 40.2k

Total with Brand Info at Minimum
180.0k

Total without Any Brand Info
220.8k – 180.0k = 40.8k

That means over the past couple weeks that ~600 cards were graded (and I can literally account for around 5% of them myself, not joking).

And if the dwellers of Olympus can be bothered to respond to anyone, I'm curious if this is what really happened. The numbers make sense.

I would, but they started auto-rejecting my emails a couple of years ago when I asked them questions.

In January 2012 I printed out the pop reports for all of the backs, there were 63,222 unknown backs and the total cards graded was 136,903.

There was 34 Magie errors in the pop reprts then.

The plot thickens.

(I do find this exercise of consequence because I am interested in estimating actual populations of individual cards.)

I was wondering if the difference you had was the second era of T206 labels. The first would be when no brand was identified (with my botec of 40.2k), the second would be brand without series and factory, and the third is the current with full information.

If one adds up the second era and subtracts it out, I ended up with 68.3k. I thought it'd be close to your number from an early eyeballing, but you have 63.2k. (If one takes out Sovereign and either American Beauty or Cycle, it gets scary close, but gotta count 'em all.)

So that falls apart.

I'll just wait for the answer, like everyone.

And if anyone does ask them, could you also ask why only Southern Leaguers are broken out under the Old Mill counts?

LOL

So much for my thinking they'd listen. But weren't people expecting/hoping for some positive changes now that they're under new ownership and management? Or is it truly just SSDD? (Same $#¶@, different day!)

They lost one of Bobby's subs and reimbursed the values claimed on the forms.
The very next sub there was an upcharge on some of the cards based off auction sales a year after the cards were received by them.

The last sub graded took 65 days to log in from the time PSA received them and 76 days from the time they moved to grading to be graded. The current sub took 71 days to be logged in and has been in grading for 95 days and counting.

The last sub graded took 320 days from the time PSA received them to the time they were graded the current sub is at 418 days since they received them and is still in grading.

Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh................

So it's really MSDD! (More $¶%£, different day!). :D

Seems so Bob.

New boss, same as the old boss. But Kevin Lenane got promoted a few times in a year. Stratospheric rise for board member and Genamint founder.

They're still passing cards with proven alterations that are sent back under the grade guarantee. They graded hundreds of counterfeit and fantasy soccer cards in the past year, and recalled maybe half of them to destroy. The other half are still floating around getting sold place to place.

Although on that topic, there are some PSA customer service reps on eBay sending messages to people with cards having mechanical errors they are asking to send back to get reslabbed accurately. So, baby steps, I guess.

Maybe when T206's that were getting reholdered, they were counted as a new card and PSA stumbled on the error or someone that had a one of one pop, questioned why there was now two cards after the reholder. I'm just guessing, but it could be a possibility. Otherwise, maybe they deleted all their slabs before a certain date, especially if they were not in anyone's registry. Maybe they assumed a majority were broken out and either left raw, were resubmitted, or went to SGC. They have that thing if your serial number is not coming up, to contact them. Maybe they are re adding as needed. My last guess is SGC was actually keeping track of crossovers and finally gave them the info and PSA finally got around to making the updates.

Could be, but many of those are all small potatoes IMO. Not tens of thousands of cards.
As to the old ones aging out, that's what I was hoping to find out from people with a lot of PSA slabs. But nobody has checked into to say their slabs were removed from the list.
On a similar tactic, I also browsed through the trimming superthread on Blowout to see if maybe PSA was starting to remove the "before" or "after" certs from the exposed cards. Because if they removed the "after" photos, they were agreeing to settlements with the people who bought trimmed cards. If they remove the "before" photos, they are confirming that the slabbed after photo cards are from the original slabs. But then the "after" cards are still slabbed with grades.

I was told that one of the missing cards was a PSA 10 T206 Bobby Byrne. I guess some of the changes can be looked up on the Internet Wayback Machine from saved copies of the registry site.

John, there was a Bobby Byrne PSA 10 in the unknown backs pop report but I see it is missing now. There were 13 PSA 10's back in 2012 and there are 12 now.

Attachment 503745

From what I was told, gemrate contacted PSA and was told they were scrubbing their T206 pop report and the certs would return. So it's possible they are adding whatever Back/Series/Factory information they can glean from the internet.

They found the perforations on the Byrne Dover Reprint encapsulated as a PSA 10 and pulled it??? :p